ICDC

Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication

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Situated in the Faculty of Culture and Society, the Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication (ICDC) is grounded in collaborative, trans-disciplinary research projects.

The Institute engages with contemporary cultural issues, while analysing the social, economic and political discourses and communicative practices that shape meaning around these.

Current research project:

The end of an era: A comparative study of online and hard-copy news discourse during the demise of print

This project investigates the nature of a revolution in what news is becoming against the backdrop of what it has been. It examines current online news in comparison with concurrent print news, while that remains available to us.

The overall goal of the project is to compare news discourse in online and print platforms. We focus on two units of analysis: the news site and the way it presents news, whether in traditional hardcopy newspaper format or its online counterpart; and the news story, the specific texts that the news sites contain as well as their multi-semiotic elements. The main data is comprised of a continuous five-day sample of parallel online and hard copy news stories from the New Zealand Herald, the country's largest daily newspaper.

Overall, the collection of texts is analysed for their linguistic, discoursal, and visual characteristics, using the tools of multimodal discourse analysis. We compare linguistic style choices of lead stories in both news platforms, with the aim of gauging what is changing and what is not in news language as it moves online. In addition, we take a close look at the NZ Herald homepage and the front page of the print version in order to assess the multimodal presentation of news in these different formats.

Recent research projects

In recent years, work at the Institute has focused on the key concerns of culture, discourse and communication. Scholars from various disciplines have come together on projects spanning language use, media such as the internet and television, and national identity.

These initiatives have included an unpacking of the discursive constructions of culture and identity in New Zealand and globally, to highlight the dialectic between micro-level, interpersonal interactions and broader, global dynamics.

Supporting project sponsors:

Last updated: 16-Mar-2015 9.38am

The information on this page was correct at time of publication. For a comprehensive overview of AUT qualifications, please refer to the Academic Calendar.